Location systems for determining the position of a mobile device relative to the location system's infrastructure are an active area of research. Two types of location systems being researched are active and passive systems. Active systems include a mobile device broadcasting signals that can be used by a passive listening infrastructure to track the position of the mobile device. Passive systems include an active infrastructure broadcasting signals into the environment, and a passive mobile device uses these signals to derive its position. Passive location systems have emerged as the paradigm of choice for user location systems due to both reduced power consumption and privacy concerns. For example, with regard to privacy, a passive location system allows a user to identify their position in the system at the user's convenience, and the infrastructure does not or cannot necessarily track the user.
A mobile device in a passive location system may determine its position within the location system, for example, by first determining the positions of beacons in the system and then using triangulation algorithms and the beacon positions to derive its current position. Thus, in a passive system, generally the positions of the beacons need to be determined before the passive location system can be used for position determination. Known techniques for determining positions of the beacons include manually measuring distances between each beacon. These techniques tend to be labor-intensive and time consuming, especially during set-up of a location system with a large number of beacons. Furthermore, after installation is complete the location system may be grown or modified. Using the known techniques for determining positions of the beacons to grow or modify the location system would again be time consuming and costly.